Defining a valid scope for customer engagement continues to be a challenge for global marketers. From information overload to the diversity of their audience, there are plenty of opportunities to create moments that matter. Defining a seamless flow of dialogue between brands and customers will help marketers engage more effectively and skyrocket sales.

The term "customer journey" has been bandied about for years, with sales and marketing teams around the world seeking some ethereal version of perfection in customer engagement. While marketers work hard to create a connection with their audience, customers often have much simpler needs: research, brand recognition and ultimately… solving a problem. Once marketers understand that their role is one of providing the right information to answer those pain points, packaged in an engaging format and at the right time, then the conversation can go beyond selling and into the realm of a true customer conversation.

Is your brand making it easy for customers to take advantage of your offerings, or are your marketing tactics standing in the way? One key difficulty lies in helping customers leapfrog through gateways when they're ready. Your marketing must be flexible enough to allow customers to take their own pathway to engagement, while still providing the option to backslide through various steps of the process as needed.

This is one of the fundamental challenges in marketing automation - defining a mass-scale workflow that still allows for outliers. Detailed data analysis is one way that marketers can gain a holistic, high-level view of customer journeys and lead generation. Understanding these interactions helps improve the quality of engagement throughout the customer life cycle.

Avoiding a Data Overload

One of the key challenges for modern marketers is to avoid a feeling of overwhelm in terms of data. Information about prospects and customers is being captured at an alarming rate, with everything from wearables to our smartphones adding to the digital clutter.

Sorting through the data points in an effort to find the signals that matter is a challenge that is still being scoped in many marketing teams. It is extremely difficult to determine whether a prospect visiting a specific landing page for the third time is ready to make a purchase or simply keeps getting distracted before they are able to complete their research.

Unfortunately, the scale of interactions is gargantuan (and growing!), with CNBC recently noting that ad spend for 2020 will top $808 billion pounds. Each digital ad is a potential touchpoint, with streaming television, social media and traditional online ads forming the greatest part of those dollars. Even so, companies such as Procter & Gamble are looking for ways to reduce the "mass clutter" and create a more targeted approach to customer engagement through the use of creative partnerships. This direction is made possible by an extensive customer database -- likely supported by an army of data analysts and marketers.

Not every brand is able to afford that scale of data-driven marketing, but we believe that this sort of approach is still accessible for small to medium-sized businesses. There are still ways to incorporate the principles within your marketing strategies. Analysing typical customer journeys and working directly with customers to understand their needs can help create a salient flow of information that will engage prospects. This type of engagement reduces the frustration level of your audience while offering creative solutions to the content needs of your prospects.

Connecting at Each Stage of the Customer Journey

As marketers, it's vital that we are able to place ourselves in the mind of customers. This can have a variety of benefits, but will specifically help marketers understand how to add value to each stage of the customer journey. Mapping out the customer journey and utilising four key strategies, marketers can create a more organic interaction with their audiences. Pulling together these shared experiences allows marketers to employ marketing automation software at specific stages of the journey without losing the authenticity of the conversation.

Four Strategies for Creating Continuous Connection

Your audience needs to feel as though the brand is fully engaged in supporting their needs -- offering exactly the right tidbit of information at precisely the right time. With these four strategies, marketers are able to bring together ideas and present them in a way that feels comfortable as opposed to feeling forced.

1. Responding to Customer Desires. When marketers truly know their audience, it is possible to "read" needs and desires and respond quickly with the required information as customers interact online. This could be anything from video content that answers frequently asked questions to a whitepaper that helps the customer further define their needs. Having detailed information ready to deliver in a format that your customers will appreciate helps create a frictionless experience. Delivering this information via autoresponders and advanced workflows helps develop the conversation between brands and their audience.

2. Providing Curated Offerings. It's easy enough to continuously share information that may or may not be relevant to your customers. What is often more difficult is to curate the best information and experiences and provide these in an easily-consumed fashion. People are busy, and the last thing they want to do is wade through irrelevant or less-than-useful content in search of answers to their burning questions. When you put forth curated, thoughtful and personalised content offerings, you are indicating to your customers that you care enough to take time to understand their needs. Triggering new email campaigns based on a customer's website activity or offering adjacent products during a sale process, the ability to automate "next best steps" is a powerful tool in any marketer's toolkit.

3. Coaching Behaviour. Are your customers struggling with meeting a goal? Perhaps it would be helpful for you to remind them and keep them moving in the right direction! This type of coaching behaviour should feel natural as opposed to overbearing and offer a genuine benefit to your audience. It can be challenging to maintain a positive tone without feeling condescending. Carefully vet any coaching content that you share to ensure that it remains positive and upbeat while also providing truly helpful details that will enrich your customer's journey.

4. Automatic Execution. When you're fortunate, you have experienced one of those magical moments where a brand seems to know what you need -- before you even realise it! This type of marketing automation requires thoughtful review but can be an extremely powerful force in moving prospects to become customers. While automation can be an incredibly powerful tool, there is a dark side as well. Marketers need to be cautious to ensure that they are maintaining the cycle of trust with consumers by continually reviewing and fine-tuning how the automated messages are being received by customers. Poorly-trained or developed automation can have a negative impact on reader perception.

As always, these strategies are only as valuable as their implementation. Without the right tools in place, it's easy to overload customers with too many irrelevant messages. Your audience could become frustrated by getting content for the wrong stage of their customer journey, such as a followup email on a sale -- when they have yet to make a purchase. Creating a customer journey map and calibrating the content and timing of these messages can be time-consuming, but the payoff for customers and marketers alike is well worth the mental and physical investments.

Guided Personal Development: The New Customer Journey

Customers are savvy, and can intrinsically "feel" when a brand is being less-than-authentic in their attempts to push them through to the next sales gate. When you think of customer engagement as a conversation instead of lead management, you're able to see the ebb and flow as information is shared between brands and audiences. Marketers can thoughtfully help refine a customer's professional development and understanding of brand offerings through a series of curated, high-quality content.

By listening carefully to how customers frame their questions, marketers are able to create whitepapers, videos, blog posts, social engagements and other digital and physical interactions. What's important is that customers are able to find information at their fingertips as well as receiving bite-sized details via a variety of mediums.

Helping people understand and more tightly define their needs and questions so they can be better customers may not feel as though it is a mission critical. However, when you consider that customers are simply trying to solve a problem, brands that are able to provide insight into the nature of that problem will be favoured by consumers.

The journey doesn't end when your prospect has purchased a product or service. Marketers that are able to help people get the most out of their investment are taking the customer service steps needed to create a long-term, valuable relationship with their audience. Each stage of this journey helps build a feeling of advocacy between customers and brands that can enhance the results of future marketing campaigns.

When you are ready to learn more about leveraging a marketing automation platform and creative content to enhance your customers' experience, contact the professionals at 1827 Marketing. Our team works closely with brands to create customer journeys, adding synergies to the conversation that provides long-term benefits for customer relationships. From automated emails and landing pages to social media marketing and journey maps, the 1827 Marketing team has the tools and expertise needed to deliver campaign results.